Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Three: How Systems Fail 25tions can make a problem worse: the cause of problems is often prior solutions.Indeed, when problems get complicated enough, wrestling with them maycreate more problems than are solved. Two IBM scientists found, for example,that the more they tried to “debug” a massive computer program, the more“bugs” their manipulation introduced. Their efforts to fix it became ever morecomplicated and time-consuming, yet produced ever weirder side effects insupposedly independent parts of the program. 16Some systems analysts, such as the mathematician Roberto Vacca, believethat poorly understood interactions may prove collectively so unmanageable asto lead to the breakdown of industrial society. 17 The Swedish vulnerabilitystudy, citing this view, found “similar apprehensions among technicians, biologistsand sociologists.” 18 But one need not extend the idea that far to see how theripples of a single event can spread far beyond its intended area of influence—especially in the energy system, which influences and is influenced by virtuallyevery aspect of our society. Perhaps the following extended qualitative illustrationcan convey the flavor of these unexpected interactions, feedback loops andpotential instabilities in modern techno-economic systems and how they bearon energy preparedness. 19 The following example is of course highly selective,but is not a wholly tongue-in-cheek description of recent trends.Tracing higher-order consequences: an illustrationThe United States pursued for many years a policy of promoting the useof more energy while holding its price down through regulation and subsidy.Because the energy looked cheap, its users did not know how much wasenough, and so they grossly underinvested in energy productivity. The resultingemergence of the United States as a massive net importer in the world oilmarket harmed many U.S. allies. It harmed the economies of some oil-exportingcountries which were being asked to lift oil at a rate detrimental to theirreservoirs or economies or both. It devastated the Third World, which wasunable to compete for the oil. The value of the dollar fell. Dollar-denominatedoil prices rose.The U.S. then needed even more foreign exchange to pay for the oil. Itearned this in three main ways: by depleting domestic stocks of commodities(which was inflationary, left the forests looking moth-eaten, and left holes inthe ground where orebodies used to be); by exporting weapons (which wasinflationary, destabilizing, and of controversial morality); and by exportingwheat and soybeans (which inverted Midwestern real-estate markets andprobably raised domestic food prices). Exported American wheat enabled theSoviets to divert capital from agriculture to military activities. This in turn